Short Squeeze Page 20

  “Aren’t I always?” he asked, which I had to admit he always was, no matter how loony I got, never considering that he might have his own worries or anxieties or existential fears to deal with, since I never tried to find that out.

  The fact was, I’d kept the relationship with Harry brutally unbalanced in my favor, without even knowing, or caring, since we’d met. Yet there he was, ready to give it another go.

  I stopped at the office to make copies of the documents Sullivan had given me and to write up a cover sheet that summarized the information. I put it all in a manila envelope, then drove over to see if I could catch Eunice Wolsonowicz at home.

  The day had started out cloudless and bright, but now a gloomy gray was forming over the ocean and heading our way. Perversely, my mood was moving in the other direction.

  As usual, I hadn’t called ahead, so I was glad to see Eunice was there when she opened the door, though the feeling was hardly mutual.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did we have an appointment?”

  “I was just in the neighborhood. I have some things to drop off for you.” I held up the envelope. “And was hoping I could ask a single question.”

  “I’m really very busy.”

  “I think you’ll want to see what’s in here.”

  I wiggled the envelope in front of her face, then stuffed it under my arm, implying that I came with the contents.

  She let the door open the rest of the way and walked back into the house. I followed her to a small sitting room and took a seat, forcing her to do the same. She perched at the edge of the cushion, suggesting there was no need to get comfortable for such a short conversation.

  “Before we go over this, can I ask you again about your sister’s financial situation? I understand from Sandy Kalandro that things were somewhat dire. And I can surmise from the lien on this house that you stepped in to help.”

  “Must we go into this?” she asked.

  “As the coadministrator of Betty’s estate, I think I need to know certain basic information.”

  Her sigh came from somewhere deep in her chest.

  “Elizabeth called me about a year ago, extremely upset. She said Sergey had made some unfortunate investments, causing them to essentially lose their entire life savings. I don’t know which was worse for her—the loss of the money or having to call me for help. And before you ask, no, we were not close. Never were, even as children, and if we hadn’t had occasional family business to deal with, we never would have spoken to each other. Nothing overtly rancorous, we were simply different people.”

  “So in exchange for a lien on this house, you gave her a credit line up to the limit of the lien.”

  “That’s correct. Frankly, I was grateful she came to me rather than borrow that money from some other source. One of my deepest regrets was giving up this house. I let my husband, and Elizabeth, convince me we’d never be back East again. Oscar and Wendy surely proved that wrong. More the reason to preserve this house for my family. Not some foreign interloper. And thankfully, that is exactly what happened.”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  She leaned even farther out of her chair.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “It stays in the family because Fuzzy inherits it.”

  She smiled an indulgent smile.

  “My son is in no position to cover a loan of that size. He’ll gladly share ownership with his sister and myself.”

  I took the cover sheet out of the envelope and handed it to her. To make it easy, I’d highlighted the pertinent figure at the bottom of the page.

  She looked at it, then looked at me, then looked at it again. Some people express shock by turning all red. Others, like Eunice, go white.

  “This is some sort of ridiculous joke,” she said.

  That’s right, I thought. A joke on you, honey.

  “Predictions of the Pontecellos’ financial demise were grossly exaggerated,” I said. “They were actually in great shape. As a result, so is Fuzzy, who’s the only one in the will. Which begs the question I came here to ask: How come?”

  Eunice literally leaped to her feet, the cover sheet crumpled in her hand.

  “This is outrageous. It’s absurd. Impossible.”

  She stalked over to a window, then stalked back. It looked like she was going to throw the wad of paper at me but thought better of it and sat down instead.

  “I will not accept this,” she said in a cold, hard, quiet voice.

  “I think you’ll have to. I’m not a big authority on Surrogate’s Court, but there’s nothing ambiguous about the legal issues. The will is clear and unqualified, the bank documents legitimate. You can probably claim whatever funds you advanced to her, but there’ll be enough left over to cover any debt on the house. How’re you getting along with Fuzzy these days?”

  “His name is Oscar,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “Sorry. Oscar,” I said, but she was already on her way out of the room. I followed her to the kitchen, where she was already talking on the phone to Sandy Kalandro. She looked at me and put her hand over the receiver.

  “He wants to review those documents immediately,” she said.

  I dropped the envelope on the kitchen table.

  “Sure. These are your copies. The key account information is in there. The bank has all the backup if he wants to go that deep. I also have their tax returns supported by a casino win/loss statement that’s pretty interesting. I haven’t reviewed the details, but apparently they support the other information. I’ll have copies of those sent over tomorrow.”

  Eunice was distracted by something Sandy must have been saying to her. She took her hand off the receiver and said to him, “See that you do,” and slammed the phone back on the hook.

  She stood as still as a statue, with her fists clenched, staring at me. It was slightly scary.

  “And to think what I did for that woman.”

  “You didn’t know,” I said. “Helping her out was a good deed. Like I said, you’ll get that money back.”

  “I’m not talking about the money. Damn her.”

  She picked a Wedgwood serving bowl off the counter and threw it against the wall. It exploded into a thousand pieces, some of which ricocheted back and hit my cheek. I put my hand up to my face and she immediately apologized.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, though not entirely like she meant it. “I’m just very upset. I need to ask you to leave. You’ve accomplished your mission.”

  “I didn’t come here to upset you. I have a fiduciary responsibility, which, by the way, you gave to me.”

  She shook her head and dropped her shoulders, probably in time to avoid bursting a blood vessel. “Of course. I know. I didn’t mean to imply—This is all just such a shock. Please.”

  I didn’t know what else to do but leave as she wanted. So I did, but not without asking my question one more time as she held the front door open for me.

  “Why did Sergey and Elizabeth leave everything to Oscar?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m certainly not going to discuss that. It’s a question for Oscar and Oscar alone.”

  She was about to close the door, so I put my hand on the jamb. Flying chinaware aside, I didn’t think she’d close the door on my hand.

  “Just one more thing,” I said. “Sergey’s car. Where is it? It’s part of their estate. I need to take possession.”

  She was annoyed by my persistence, but the prospect of getting rid of the car might have been the one bright spot of her day.

  “It’s in the garage behind the house. Feel free to remove it as quickly as you are able.”

  I moved my hand out of the way and she closed the door. I walked around the house and across the backyard to the freestanding garage, surrounded like the house itself with beautiful, luxurious foliage. It was built in the same shingle style, with two bays and an apartment above. I picked the left bay and pulled up the door.

  It was empty. So was the right bay.
I searched the inside of the garage with my eyes as if the ten-ton relic might have slipped into one of the dark corners.

  I decided not to bother Eunice again. I’d freaked her out enough for one day, and I couldn’t afford to completely alienate her. I also needed to clear my head, and that meant getting away from that house.

  I needed a theory. Some people insist any problem can be solved if you have an operating theory. A set of assumptions that, if proven, lead inexorably to a solution. It’s the scientist’s approach to things. I envied their orderly, calculating minds. Mine was the other type, but sometimes I liked to pretend it wasn’t.

  I drove back to Bridgehampton, passing by Brick Kiln Road, my street, and down Scuttle Hole Road another few miles to stop and look at the horses grazing in the middle of a hundred-acre horse farm. The gray sky overhead had cleared again, and the sun was getting close to the horizon, making the grass look greener and the horses more elegant.

  I concentrated on one really big brown boy who caught my eye when he broke into a trot. He rocked his head from side to side as he ran, came to a near stop, then took off again. Sheer joie de vivre was how I interpreted it, since there were no equine experts to ask. It was a rare and beautiful thing to see, and a genuine gift to behold. As I stood there transfixed, a revelation burst into my mind.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, I said to myself as I ran to the car and went directly to my house. I kicked off my shoes, stripped down to the buff, wrapped an ancient kimono around me, and poured a glass of wine. I’d burned through all my cigarettes but found a few half-smoked in the ashtray.

  I climbed over a pile of boxes that somehow had grown in the middle of the hall leading to the rear porch, where I had my old home office. This was not the ideal environment for unfettering one’s consciousness, but it was mine, it was private, and it had the old reliable HP.

  I took a swig of the wine, lit a stubby cigarette, and booted up.

  The investigative software I launched wasn’t as top secret as the programmers’ hype wanted you to think, but it was pretty dicey. Legal search engines had become so powerful, I’d almost forgotten I had it, stored in a folder marked RECIPE FOR SWEDISH MEATBALLS. I got it from a professional geek named Randall Dodge, who’d spent a few years in air force cybersecurity. He gave me the application after I helped him out of a drug rap he’d only gotten into to save his little brother, who had half Randall’s brains and one-quarter of his character. Randall lived on the Shinnecock Reservation and ran his own specialty computer hardware/software shop in Southampton called Good to the Last Byte, with the proud slogan, “If it’s got a screen and a keyboard I can fix it. Maybe.”

  The software allowed you to skip over the usual entry points and slip directly into lots of useful databases without the inconvenience of user names and passwords. Randall was up front about the questionable legality when he offered it to me. I accepted it with outward reluctance and inward glee.

  As soon as the little window said I was up and running, I was on the hunt.

  What you want when chasing people down is a complicated name. The best defense against invasion of privacy is to be John Smith or Mary Jones. For my purposes, it was better to be Oscar Wolsonowicz.

  It also helps to be hunting someone young enough to have had his vital statistics loaded into a database. A remarkable amount of legacy information has been scanned in and rendered searchable, but it’s not as reliable. Oscar was the right age and right where he was supposed to be.

  I’d been so focused on the adult Fuzzy, on what a standard Web search had to say about him, I’d neglected the basics. The vital statistics, such as: born New York City, New York; educated at the Spenser Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts, and the University of Arizona, B.S. in business administration. All of this I could get anywhere. What I wanted then I could only get from confidential hospital records. Again, not a big challenge with a name like Wolsonowicz.

  All it took was a few keystrokes to get to the link and the following information from New York–Presbyterian Hospital obstetrics unit: Oscar Wolsonowicz. Male. Blood type O+. Seven lbs., three ozs. M. Elizabeth Hamilton. F. Antonin Wolsonowicz.

  That Betty. Full of surprises.

  19

  You can’t go wrong with basic black and a string of pearls. This is the priceless wisdom passed down from my namesake, Jacqueline Kennedy, to the undeserving couture-challenged in need of something fast and foolproof.

  The earrings turned out to be a time-consuming component, but I didn’t let that keep me from showing up at Harry’s at exactly the moment I said I would.

  When he opened the door he looked at his watch and scowled.

  “Who are you and what have you done with Jackie Swaitkowski?”

  “I’ve been on time before.”

  “Don’t try to fool me. I know you’re an imposter. Though frankly, a very nice-looking one.”

  “So invite me in, because this is the only Jackie you’re getting tonight.”

  He was still making up a tray of hors d’oeuvres, but the wine was chilled and ready. As he poured I said he had to hear about recent events, in painstaking detail.

  “I need to talk this through,” I said. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Only if I can tell you about shipping yellowfin tuna from Pacific Costa Rica to Kyoto.”

  “I’d love that,” I said, settling back in my chair with a handful of crackers and Brie. “You go first.”

  “I was kidding.”

  “I know. But I’m interested. Really.”

  Caught off guard, it took a moment for him to ramp up the story. The saga was actually incredibly involving, which was always true. I loved both the particulars and the way he told a tale. I was ashamed that I’d rarely asked him about his work, but when he launched into one of his stories, before I knew it I was swept away.

  Best yet, once he was finished, my story was utterly clear for takeoff, conscience-wise. But just to be sure, I let the small talk fill the transition.

  “So out with it,” he said. “What’ve you been up to?”

  “Oh, me?” I said, and then dove in with both feet.

  This took us through a full tray of goodies and most of the white wine. Along the way we studied the Pontecellos’ tax returns, which Harry gladly volunteered to copy and send overnight to Eunice and Sandy Kalandro, browsed through the materials manifest, and generally had a swell time, leading to an uncontrollable affection for my host starting in my heart and heading south.

  As a result dinner was postponed for a few hours, though not all appetites are indulged in the same way.

  “I’m glad I came back,” said Harry when he finally had a chance to say anything.

  “I am, too.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes. Let’s leave it at that for now, okay?” I said.

  “Absolutely. A great baseline.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “A starting point. A foundation upon which to build.”

  “Okay. The first part of the building needs to be steak, asparagus, and salad, if my memory of your refrigerator is what I think it is.”

  After dinner I went through the manifest more carefully, checking it against the actual belongings. I was half braced the whole time for what I might find, but for better or worse, it was just stuff—the accumulated detritus of long and decidedly idiosyncratic lives.

  It eventually got to that awkward time of the evening where a person has to decide to stay or go. These are not minor decisions for those of us in complicated, unresolved situations. I opted to stay, with a proviso.

  “I’d like you to come with me tomorrow to see Fuzzy again. Now that you’ve been introduced and formed a bond.”

  “You’re afraid of him,” he said.

  “If I wanted a thug I’d ask Sam. I need a tagalong I want to spend the day with, who also showed remarkable diplomatic skills the last time. You can entertain me in the car with tales of logistical derring-do.”

  As I faded off
to sleep that night, I almost got into another debate with myself over whether I was using Harry, taking advantage of his tireless good nature, or if I thought I needed to create artificial conflicts to distract me from confronting the real possibility that I felt something for the towering mensch.

  I’m sure this sort of thing causes 90 percent of the insomnia suffered by women between the ages of eleven and eighty-five. I decided to put a stop to it right there and willed myself into a troubled sleep filled with anxious dreams and unresolved quandaries.

  It was a repeat of the last time. Harry drove his Volvo, and I did my best to provide coffee service and onboard entertainment. I was glad to be going against the crush of traffic coming in every weekday morning from less expensive habitats to the west, tradesman and service people heading for jobs in the Hamptons. While not a development alarmist like other natives, it did make me wonder where it was all going to end. Maybe when the cliff dwellers of Manhattan realized they weren’t coming out to the country anymore, with small towns and unpretentious, happy people like Potato Pete, but rather to a gilded suburb, where everyone had signed on to the fantasy that their expectations and anxieties could be left back in the City.

  The transition to the Up Island sprawl had blurred in recent years. But in my child’s mind, I could still tell when I entered that other world, the Western territories, entangled with stop-and-go highways, shopping malls, and hysterical neon enticements. That trackless terrain of frenetic enterprise and vast, anonymous neighborhoods, like Fuzzy’s.

  As a general strategy, arriving unannounced at people’s homes had the advantage of surprise, but was worthless if the subject wasn’t there in the first place. So the hour-long trip from Southampton could have been for naught. And it almost was.

  Just as we were heading down the street to Fuzzy’s subterranean abode, we saw him pull away in his old Datsun. Following was not that big a challenge. All we had to do was keep track of the billows coming out of the tailpipe. “Follow that smog,” I said to Harry.